Letter: It's the jobs, stupid

Thursday

Apr 18, 2013 at 12:01 AM

It's the jobs, stupid

It's the jobs, stupid

When President Obama took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent. We've spent nearly a trillion dollars to stimulate the economy, but more than four years later the unemployment rate stands today at 7.6 percent. The only thing the stimulus created was a new catch phrase: "saved or created."

Only 88,000 jobs were created in March; 125,000 are needed each month just to keep pace with the population growth. More than 300,000 new jobs each and every month would be needed to reduce unemployment rates to a respectable number.

In February, 300,000 Americans dropped out of the workforce and 500,000 left in March. These folks are not considered unemployed because they have given up on their search for work. If they were counted, the unemployment rate would stand tall at over 11 percent. Today 9 million fewer Americans are employed than in 2009.

January 2009 was the first time in the new millennium that the labor participation rate dropped below the two-thirds mark at 65.7 percent. This drop has been precipitously steady and March showed a 63.3 percent participation rate, the lowest since 1979.

President Obama has conceded 5 percent of his salary to the Treasury Department in light of these abysmal times. His gesture would pay off the $16.5 trillion deficit in just 850 million years. We learned this while he was hobnobbing with millionaires and billionaires at four fundraisers. Costing taxpayers $180,000 per hour, the fundraisers were for 2014 unnamed Democrat candidates in an attempt to take back the House of Representatives.